Faculty & Staff Resources

Captioning in iMovie

 

​How to Add Captions to your videos with iMovie

Special Note: While iMovie does not currently provide a feature dedicated specifically to adding captions, it is still possible to add captions to a movie using a few different styles of titles. With this feature, it is possible to adjust the font size, font color and caption positioning, transitions and timings for a movie, video or slideshow. This article provides detailed instructions on how to use the Title Overlay feature to add captions to any project using iMovie.

  1. Open iMovie and choose New project.

  2. Import your video.

  3. Drag your video to the filmstrip area.

  4. Click on Titles and choose the style called Lower.

  5. Type in the text of about 5 seconds of video and adjust the Text duration time accordingly.

  6. The text block appears over the film strip and can be moved into place to sync and lengthened or shortened of time that it appears on screen.

  7. Once you’ve adjusted your text just right and centered it in the lower portion of the screen, select the text box, press Command C to copy, and then repeated press Command V to paste the 5 second text all along the filmstrip.

  8. Now all you need to do is listen to the dialog and enter appropriate text in each segment of the video.

  9. If a sound (not dialog) is somewhat meaningful to the caption reader, place it in brackets.

  10. After typing in all the captions you can share the movie as a file (MP4) or send it to the iMovie Theatre, iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, or Vimeo.

  11. Have fun captioning because… it’s the right thing to do!

Use the link below to download a Microsoft Word doc with instructions plus with screen shots

MS Word DocumentAdding Captions to Student Videos on a MAC